CES: Sling Media turns regular TVs into Slingbox targets with its new Slingcatcher

Earlier this year, my colleague Dan Farber interviewed Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian. Sling has gotten a lot of attention over the year for its Slingbox. Going back to the series of Dead Finger Technology interviews that I've been doing, there are a lot of people I know who would say that their Slingbox is their Dead Finger Technology. Sling Media is here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas showing off their newest addition to the Slingbox family: the Slingcatcher.

What's a Sling Catcher? Well, whereas a Slingbox usually "slings" television content from your set top box, DVR, etc. across the Internet to a computer, PDA, or smartphone, the Sling Catcher is simply another target device that allows the Slingbox to sling its content to a TV that's in another room, or across the world.

Because of the way a Slingbox can redistribute content across a telecommunications infrastructure, it has generated a bit of controversy in the broadcast television business. In the middle of last year, officials from Major League Baseball (an organization that's extremely sensitive about the redistribution of its content) took swings at Sling for the way its technology allows someone like my father in New York (where I grew up) to distribute the broadcast of a Mets game to me in Boston. Now, with the Sling Catcher, the practice of slinging content is even easier since all you need a TV and it's certain to dig further under the skin of those concerned with the way Sling's technology works.  Although we only brushed the subject of content redistribution, I caught up with Sling Media spokesperson Brian Jacquet who described in detail how the Slingbox and the Slingcatcher work: